« Social Engineering
Motorola RAZR V3 + Bluetooth + Powerbook = Bad Ass »

Tuesday, December 7th, 2004Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Use Gmail To Spam Filter A Different Email Address

by Shawn @ 9:42 am · filed under Tech Stuff

I get way too much spam. To the tune of 2,000+ each day. It's always fun to wake up and sift through 800 emails to find 3 that aren't spam. I do some client-side spam filtering, but it's still annoying to have to actually download the emails (especially when traveling and you have a slow Internet connection).

Gmail is by far the best web-based email system I've used (it's fast, clean, etc.), but it's not practical to use for business (since the domain is always gmail.com). Recently I noticed that Gmail allows you to access your email via POP3 (via SSL, which is really nice!). So I played around with it a little bit, and realized that stuff that gets stuck in the spam folder are not downloaded with you grab your emails via POP3. So then I was thinking, why not just forward my normal email to my gmail account, access it via POP3 like normal and then just have that account on my client setup with my real email address.

Guess what? It works brilliantly. Now I'm not flooded with spam, I don't have to download spam for client-side filtering and when I send email, it still comes from digitalpoint.com.

The one thing that would make it even better (and make me use it from the web more) would be the ability to set the From address to my non-Gmail address. Currently you can set the Reply-To address to anything you want, but the From is always gmail.com. If that was possible, I would use Gmail's SMTP server (it's also SSL enabled) and I would use the web interface for Gmail more.

10 Responses to “Use Gmail To Spam Filter A Different Email Address”

  1. Yelena Says:
    December 7th, 2004 at 10:13 am

    I hope that works.. You will just have to figure out what to do with all the free time you get..

  2. Vicious Summer Says:
    December 7th, 2004 at 3:56 pm

    You think too much…;)

  3. Nathan Weinberg Says:
    December 7th, 2004 at 10:58 pm

    Shawn, Nathan from InsideGoogle. I posted about your idea, and was wondering if you could put up some numbers showing how well Gmail filtered your spam. Thanks.

  4. Shawn Says:
    December 7th, 2004 at 11:22 pm

    It works pretty well. So far zero false positives, and less than 1% of the spam getting through.

  5. Javier Says:
    December 8th, 2004 at 5:27 am

    How do you do to delete/not store spam messages at your GMail account? If you receive 2000+ spam messages daily, to delete them manually will be very hard.

    Unfortunately, when you forward your GMail messages to another account, spam messages are forwarded too :-(

  6. Shawn Says:
    December 8th, 2004 at 8:18 am

    It’s fine because stuff in the Spam folder is not downloaded via POP3 in Gmail. And it doesn’t matter if spam would get forwarded from Gmail, because I’m not forwarding my Gmail. :)

  7. Anonymous Says:
    December 9th, 2004 at 7:38 pm

    GMail also has a forwarding service now. So, I give out my gmail address and forward those emails that pass a filter to my regular address. Works, too.

  8. Sprint Says:
    January 1st, 2005 at 1:22 pm

    This is nice… Now that I have a GMail account I will use it as a spam filter and a gathering point to all my email (I will see if this is possible).

    I would really love to have the hability to send the email thru my own email address instead of the @gmail.com too…

  9. 8dee Says:
    August 23rd, 2005 at 12:21 am

    that is a great idea….I am only using gmail as storage….but I must say that their SPAM filtering is very effective.

  10. Allen Says:
    February 7th, 2006 at 6:58 am

    I get sooooo much spam from gmail addresses. I hope gmail starts getting serious about banning spammers. I will start block all from gmail accounts.

Leave a Reply